By: Christopher West

I remember doing a lot of radio interviews in the Fall of 2007 promoting my new book The Love That Satisfies.   Subtitled Reflections on Eros and Agape, this book offers a guided meditation on key quotes from Pope Benedict XVI’s encyclical God is Love.   In the midst of our pornographic culture, like John Paul II before him, Benedict is helping us recover the true meaning of erotic love (eros) as an image of divine love (agape).

God’s Divine Love for Us is  Erotic

One day someone contacted me who had heard me on the radio.   She thought that, by appealing to erotic love as an image of God’s love, I was somehow debasing God.   We obviously have to be careful in the way we apply this imagery.   Heaven, for instance, is not going to be “sex in the clouds.”   We use the loving union of man and woman only as an analogy of the love we will experience in the heavenly “Marriage of the Lamb” (see Rev 19).  I’d suggest, however, that what’s really involved in the difficulty we can experience applying erotic imagery to God is not a debasement of God, but a debasement of sex.   We have been conditioned by our pornographic culture to think of sex in a radically distorted way.   When this distorted vision appears as the “norm,” it becomes increasingly difficult to reclaim the pure meaning of sexuality and erotic love as an image of the divine.   When we seek to do so, we are often overwhelmed by what we might call “pornographic interference.” Like static snow on a TV screen, you try to make out the true image, but interference distorts the picture.

This, I would suggest, is the precise goal of the deceiver, the one who is ultimately behind the terrible distortion of sex in today’s world.   He is quite literally hell-bent on keeping us from recognizing the true meaning of our bodies and sexuality.   Why?   Because if we come to understand and live the true theology of our bodies, it will launch us like a rocket into the heart of the mystery of God.  As Pope Benedict explains, “The Prophets, particularly Hosea and Ezekiel, describe God’s passion for his people using boldly erotic images” (God is Love, n. 9). The story of Hosea taking a prostitute for a wife at the Lord’s command is well known.   In this marriage we discover an image of God’s love for us, his unfaithful spouse.   Betrothed love is the proper expression of eros.   Hence, since this betrothal expresses God’s love for his people, God’s “love may certainly be called eros,” Pope Benedict tells us, “yet it is also totally agape” (n. 9).

True and False Prophets

God’s love is a love that yearns for intimacy with the “other” and rejoices in that other’s beauty.   “As the bridegroom rejoices over the bride, so shall your God rejoice over you” (Is 62:5).   The Prophet Ezekiel’s imagery is even more explicit:

And you grew up and became tall and arrived at full maidenhood; your breasts were formed, and your hair had grown; yet you were naked and bare.   When I passed by you again and looked upon you, behold, you were at the age for love. …I plighted my troth to you and entered into a covenant with you, says the Lord God, and you became mine. (Ez 16:7-8)

Pope John Paul II taught that the body and erotic love have a “prophetic” meaning.   The body “speaks.”   The union of spouses proclaims a “great mystery” — the mystery of Christ’s union with the Church (see Eph 5:31-32).   But wherever prophets are sent to proclaim truth, false prophets inevitably appear with cunning schemes to distort that truth and deceive God’s people.   Pornographers are false prophets.   And our difficulty as God’s people in seeing the true theological  meaning of the body and erotic love is a measure of their success.  If we find it difficult or even impossible to see the mystery of God revealed through human sexuality, it’s probably because we have been “evangelized” by men like Hugh Hefner and Larry Flint, rather than by men like John Paul II and Benedict XVI.   This is why our world (beginning with all of us in the Church), as both popes have insisted, is desperately in need of a new evangelization.

By: Christopher West

If you’re familiar with Broadway musicals, you’ve certainly heard of Spring Awakening.   In this rendition of Frank Wedekind’s play, Steven Sater and Duncan Sheik make creative use of their modern rock score to explore the inner world of teenage angst and yearning in sexually repressed 19^th century Germany.

First performed in the Spring of 2006, the secular press hailed it “an unexpected jolt of sudden genius.”   Some religious folk, on the other hand, deemed it an “abomination” with no goal other than to encourage sin.   Indeed, the play takes a very frank look at things like masturbation, fornication, sadism, incest, homosexuality, and abortion.   A few of these behaviors are portrayed on stage leaving little to the audience’s imagination.   Because of that alone, some might expect me as a teacher of Catholic sexual ethics to join the angry bandwagon of those who condemn this play outright.   But I’m not going to.   Let me explain why.

A Cry from the Depths of our Hearts

In his Letter to Artists, John Paul II wrote that “even in situations where culture and the Church are far apart, art remains a kind of bridge to religious experience. …Even when they explore   the darkest depths of the soul or the most unsettling aspects of evil, artists give voice in a way to the universal desire for redemption” (n. 10).

This explains precisely what I think Spring Awakening offers as a piece of art.   It does, indeed, explore some of the “most unsettling aspects of evil.” There where times during the show when I had to put my head down because of the “weight” of grief I was experiencing.   But the over-riding theme of this musical, as I saw it, was a cry from the depths of the spirit for redemption, more specifically, for the “redemption of the body” (Rom 8) so often spoken of by John Paul II.  With all its outspoken rebellion against religion, I’m convinced that this play — like the sexual revolution itself — is not a rejection of Christianity per se.   Rather, it rejects the heretical, puritanical vision (or rather, anti-vision) of the body and sex that so often passes for Christianity.   Puritanism says “spirit good — body bad,” and the Catholic Church is the first to insist that this is something everyone should reject!

Puritanism  Breeds  Atheism

The hormone-laden teens in this play are longing for answers to their questions while parents, teachers, and preachers offer nothing but shaming condemnations.   Moritz pleads with his more informed friend Melchior, “Melchi, why—why am I haunted by the legs of a woman?”   Melchior responds, “All right then, I’ll tell you.   I got it out of books.   But prepare yourself: it made an atheist out of me.”  It struck me when I heard this line: puritanism breeds atheism — it must.   Why?   Because those who awaken to the goodness and beauty of human sexuality must reject any god who condemns it.

But such a god is not the true God — thank God!   Far from being evil, the Bible actually employs sexual love as its main analogy of divine love.   The Bible begins with the union of man and woman and it ends with the union of Christ and his bride, the Church.   And smack-dab in the middle of the Bible — literally the Bible’s centerpiece — is that divine ode to erotic love, the Song of Songs.  The Song of Songs is the authentic soundtrack of Christianity.   As great mystics like John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila have told us, it is the song that God has been singing to us throughout the ages as an invitation to ecstatic, blissful “nuptial union” with him.

Spring Awakening  is an attempt to break the bonds of puritanism and sing what the heart is created by God to sing — the Song of Songs.   In its search for that Song, it errs by swinging the pendulum from one extreme to the other.   But if Christians only respond with condemnations without trying to understand and, even more, answer the utter cry of this play for sexual redemption, then Spring Awakening’s indictment of what it knows to be “Christianity” is both understandable and deserved.  Christ came to teach us how to sing the Song of Songs.   Would that that was what the teens in this play were taught by their parents, teachers, and preachers!

By: Christopher West

A few years back, the title of an article in the National Catholic Register caught my attention —   “Divorce: In the Image and Likeness of Hell” (Sep 30 – Oct 6, 2007).   The first few sentences confirmed what I intuited from the title — this writer, Melinda Selmys, was going to speak plainly.   It seems she’d had enough of the sweet, pious lingo with which many Catholic writers often speak about marriage.   Heck, for all I know, she may have had me in mind.

She observes, “The theologians remind us that our married life is an image of the union between … Christ [and the Church].   We hear of … the bliss of the two becoming one.”   When things get tough, we are told “to improve our communication, fall in love with each other all over again, observe the tender moments, etc., etc.”  Then she allows such advice to butt up against the all-too real experiences of actual marriages.   “But how are you to fall in love again,” she asks, “with an insensitive beast who has broken your heart and slept with another woman?   How can you see your sex life as an image of the intimate life of the blessed Trinity when your wife consents only on a full moon when Mars is in Virgo, and makes love with the enthusiasm of a dead frog?”

The Brutal Truth

When I first read that last line, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.   But I did breathe a sigh of relief.   Man, it’s refreshing to hear people say it like it is.   For whatever reason, such brutally honest writing seems rare in much of the Catholic press.   It’s as if those who promote Catholic teaching are afraid it won’t go over so well if we talk about the real sufferings of following Jesus.   So we conveniently promote the glories of the Christian life without a realistic assessment of the sorrows.   I, myself, have been guilty of that on occasion, I think.  Christian marriage is a messy, painful business.   How could it be otherwise?   “Husbands love your wives as Christ loved the Church” (Eph 5:25).   If marital union is an image of Christ’s union with the Church, this means, as Selmy observes, that marriage will involve “the same agony, the mingling of tears and blood, the same thorns digging into our skulls, the same nails plowed through our palms.”

In light of how many people believe the Church is “down on sex,” the glories and ecstasies to which authentic Catholic teaching calls spouses in their union should be emphasized.   But these glories and ecstasies are the fruit of embracing much purifying suffering.   If the joy is not set before us, we will have no motivation to endure the suffering.   “For the joy set before him Christ endured the cross” (Heb 12:2).   But if the path to those joys is not also realistically assessed, we will naively wonder why marriage is so agonizing.

A Realistic Look at the Pains of Marriage

As Selmys writes, “In every marriage there are moments when it seems impossible.   I am sure that when Christ fell on the road to Calvary, the thought of lifting his cross again … seemed like madness.   Perhaps its different through divine eyes, but for men, there are always moments when we turn to heaven and say, ‘Are you insane?’   When we are hardly able to see to the top of Golgotha through our dust-bitten tears, we derive no comfort from reassurances that crucifixion isn’t all that bad, and that, seen in perspective, its’ really a beautiful expression of love and self-giving.”

It is a beautiful expression of love, to be sure.   But it’s beautiful precisely because Jesus selflessly embraced the wine-press of suffering.   It’s when we’re face to face with that wine-press that we’re most tempted by sexual sin — be it an affair, internet pornography, masturbation, contraception.   Why?   Because sexual sin promises the pleasure without the pain, the “wine” without the wine-press.  True love is always linked with suffering.   As Fr. Paul Quay said in his book The Christian Meaning of Human Sexuality, “It is precisely this link between true love and suffering that is rejected by sexual sin.”   Christ suffered greatly in loving his spouse.   We are to follow him.

By: Christopher West

Feast of the Assumption

For hundreds of years Christians have celebrated the feast of Mary’s Assumption.  Although it was not specifically defined as a dogma (a teaching of the Catholic Church on a specific subject which the Church, guided by the Holy Spirit and protected from error on this particular teaching, proclaims is revealed to us by God) until 1950, belief in Mary’s bodily assumption has always been part of Christian faith.   Why 1950?   God has his own reasons for the timing of such things.   But even from a human perspective, the middle of the twentieth century provided a perfect historical context for the Church’s declaration.

As Father Donald Calloway writes, “During the twentieth century, the body … began to be seen by many people as a burden, something to be overcome and manipulated. …Thus began such procedures as sex changes, plastic surgery, and genetic manipulation.   In a certain sense, it can be said that the twentieth century preoccupation with the body has led to a schizophrenic approach to … the body: either worship it as divine, or seek to manipulate it (or even kill it) through technological means” (The Virgin Mary and Theology of the Body, p. 45).

In the midst of such schizophrenia, Mary’s assumption proclaims the ultimate truth about the human body: it is destined to share in the eternal glory of the Trinity.   Christ came bodily to redeem us bodily — and Mary’s bodily assumption is the proof that what Christ did on the cross worked.   Mary is fully redeemed body and soul.   In this sense, Mary is the hope of all humanity.   She lives what we hope for.  The declaration of the Assumption in 1950 was also a powerful response to the devastation of World War II.   The horror of Hitler’s concentration camps had only recently been exposed.   Moreover, man had discovered how to split the atom — the basic building block of the physical universe — and had exploited this knowledge with terrifying consequences.

Coincidence or Providence?

A Catholic doctor named Takashi Nagai survived the explosion that rocked Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, killing nearly 80,000 of his countrymen.   Writing of Dr. Nagai’s experience, author Robert Ellsberg observes in his book All Saints that “Nagai found it remarkable that as a result of heavy clouds obscuring the originally intended city, the bomb had been dropped that day on Nagasaki, an alternate target.   As a further result of clouds, the pilot had not fixed his target on the Mitsubishi iron works, as intended, but instead on the Catholic Cathedral in the Urakami district of the city, home to the majority of Nagasaki’s Catholics.   He noted that the end of the war came on August 15, feast of the Assumption of Mary, to whom the Cathedral was dedicated.”

At an open-air Mass just days after the bombing, Dr. Nagai said to the survivors, “We must ask if this convergence of events — the ending of the war and the celebration of her feast [Mary’s Assumption] — was merely coincidental or if there was here some mysterious providence of God” (All Saints, p. 13).   We might say that in response to the A-bomb, in 1950 the Church dropped a G-bomb, a “grace-bomb” that truly is the hope of the world.   “The woman,” representing us all, has been fully redeemed body and soul.

The Serpent & the Woman

Three years later Hugh Hefner founded Playboy Magazine.   It makes a person wonder: Could the pornographic revolution of the second half of the twentieth century be some kind of diabolic response to the proclamation of the Assumption?   It’s certainly curious that the modern pornographic degradation of women’s bodies began so soon after the most glorious elevation of the female body in history.   The devil’s enmity has always been against “the woman” (see Gen 3, Rev 12).   Christ lifts her up and the enemy attempts to pull her down.  John Paul II observed that in “the face of the … debasement to which modern society frequently subjects the female body, the mystery of the assumption proclaims the supernatural destiny and dignity of every human body. …By looking at [Mary], the Christian learns to discover the value of his own body” (address, July 9, 1997).   So, let us look to Mary’s glorified body in order to learn the value of our own incarnate humanity.

By: Christopher West

The “Marriage Bed” of the Cross

I’s like to take the opportunity to reflect anew on the mystery of Christ’s body “given up for us” on the cross.   I’d like to take an angle familiar to the mystics of our tradition, but sadly unfamiliar to most Catholics in the pew.   It is an idea that, if we meditate prayerfully on it, can help us reclaim the holiness of the body and of marital union.   It is the idea of the cross as Christ’s “marriage bed” — the place where he consummates his love for his Bride, the Church.  While this imagery might raise some eyebrows, it needn’t be cause for scandal if we properly understand the spousal symbolism of the Bible.   As the Catechism observes, “The entire Christian life bears the mark of the spousal love of Christ and the Church.   Already Baptism …is a nuptial mystery; it is so to speak the nuptial bath which precedes the wedding feast, the Eucharist” (CCC 1617).   We might also recall Christ’s final words of love uttered for his Bride from the cross: “It is consummated” (see Jn 19:30).

St. Augustine wrote, “Like a bridegroom Christ went forth from his chamber….   He came to the marriage-bed of the cross, and there in mounting it, he consummated his marriage. And when he perceived the sighs of the creature, he lovingly gave himself up to the torment in place of his bride, and joined himself to [her] forever” (Sermo Suppositus 120).   Saint Mechtilde, a German mystic of the 13^th century, echoed the same idea when she wrote that Christ’s “noble nuptial bed was the very hard wood of the Cross on which he leaped with more joy and ardor then a delighted bridegroom” (cited by Blaise Arminjon in The Cantata of Love).

I first heard this idea of the cross as a “marriage bed” from the late Bishop Fulton Sheen in a recorded lecture I listened to some years ago.   Sheen’s booming voice still echoes in my mind: “Do you know what is happening at the foot of the cross?” he asked.   “Nuptials, I tell you!   Nuptials!”   Like Augustine, he then described the cross as Christ’s “marriage bed” which he mounted not in pleasure, but in pain in order to unite himself forever to his Bride.  The good bishop went on to explain that whenever Jesus calls Mary “woman” (such as at the Wedding in Cana and at the cross), he is speaking as the new Adam to the new Eve, the Bridegroom to the Bride.   Here, of course, the relationships are outside the realm of blood.   The fact that Christ’s mother is “the woman” symbolizing his “Bride” needn’t trouble us.   The marriage of the new Adam and new Eve consummated at the cross is mystical and virginal.   The Catechism, itself, refers to this “woman” (Mary) as “the Bride of the Lamb” (CCC 1138).

New Adam, New Eve, New Bridegroom, New Bride

Contemplating this spousal symbolism opens up treasures for us. Just as the first Adam was put into a deep sleep and Eve came from his side, so the new Adam accepts the slumber of death and the new Eve is born of his side (see CCC 766). This is often portrayed artistically by an image of “the woman” (Mary) holding a chalice — or sometimes a large jug reminiscent of Cana — at the foot of the cross receiving the flow of blood and water from Christ’s side.   The blood and water, of course, symbolize the “nuptial bath” of Baptism and the “wedding feast” of the Eucharist.

But there’s still more to this!   The mystical union of the new Adam and the new Eve has already borne supernatural fruit.   “‘Woman, behold, your son!’   Then he said to the disciple, ‘Behold, your mother!’” (Jn 19:26-27).   One might also render Christ’s words as follows, “Woman, behold your giving birth to a new son.”   Mary’s sorrows at the foot of the cross are her labor pains in giving birth to all the children of the Church.   Here the beloved disciple (John) represents the offspring “born anew not of perishable seed, but of imperishable” (1 Pt 1:23), “not of blood, …but of God” (Jn 1:13).  St. Paul wasn’t kidding when he described the union of spouses as “a great mystery” that refers to Christ and the Church (see Eph 5:31-32).   Jesus, open our hearts ever anew to this “great mystery” revealed through your body given up for us on the “marriage bed” of the cross.   Amen.

By: Christopher West

The headline in USA Today caught my eye — “A Dance For Chastity,” as did the large sketch of a teenage girl wearing a t-shirt that read, “Virginity Lane: Exit When Married.” Was USA Today actually offering a positive article on the growing chastity movement?   Then I read the tag line: “Some evangelical Christians are organizing ‘purity balls,’ at which young girls are urged to put off sex until marriage.   Instead, these events simply reinforce society’s misguided notions of patriarchal religion.” So believes Mary Zeiss Stange, a professor of women’s studies and religion at Skidmore College, who authored the article (see USA Today, March 19, 2007, p. 15A).

She describes these dances as follows: “Imagine an evening of candlelight and roses, fancy food and formal dress and ballroom dancing, all in celebration of a promise of loving commitment…. They are called purity balls, and they celebrate the father-daughter bond.   Tuxedo-clad dads promise to ‘war for’ their daughters’ ‘purity’….   Daughters, in turn, vow abstinence until marriage.”  Stange looks for a few positive things to say about how these events promote “quality time” between daughters and their fathers.   Still, she concludes that “there is something profoundly disturbing about these purity balls and all they represent.”   Assuming any sensible human being would agree, she asserts: “Underlying this whole business, of course, is the age-old assumption that sex is dirty.”   Really?   If a father desires purity for his daughter he must view sex as something dirty?   “Of course,” according to Professor Stange. For her, “purity” has become a dirty word. Read the entire article here.

Purity vs. Puritanism

But here Stange falls for a common error — that of confusing purity with puritanism.   Puritanism stems from a heretical view of the body and sex as something inherently tainted, “dirty,” even evil.   This is not authentic Christian purity.   The idea that the body is inherently evil is precisely what authentic Christian purity frees us from.   Christian purity thoroughly cleanses us from the “dirt” that attacks the true goodness of the body and sex.   That’s what sexual purity is — freedom from all that taints sex.

Stange’s accusation that Christians consider sex to be “dirty” may be true in some, even many cases.   But this is by no means a neurosis induced by authentic Christian purity. A suspicion towards the physical world and discomfort with all things sexual seems to hang like a dark shadow over all human experience. Like the rest of humanity, Christians have been and still are affected and even infected by it. Hence, through the centuries the Church has defended the goodness of the physical world and the sacredness of the human body against many heresies. The Church still battles today to counter the heretical “spirit good—body bad” dichotomy which many people assume to be Christian belief.

Christianity does not reject the body!

How can one stress it enough?   In a virtual “ode to the flesh,” the Catechism proclaims: “‘The flesh is the hinge of salvation.’ We believe in God who is creator of the flesh; we believe in the Word made flesh in order to redeem the flesh; we believe in the resurrection of the flesh, the fulfillment of both the creation and the redemption of the flesh” (1015, emphasis added).  Perhaps we as Christians could take Stange’s challenge as an opportunity to examine our own approach to purity.   Are there ways that a negative view of the body has seeped into our thinking?   Do we in any way devalue the body and sex in the name of “purity”?   Do we speak of the body or certain body parts as “dirty”?   Do we label the body itself as something impure rather than examine the impurity of our hearts?

It is the lustful heart that is impure, not the human body itself.   This is a critical distinction to understand if our purity is to be just that — pure.  And it is a critical distinction to live if we are to counter the widespread idea reinforced by USA Today that Christianity views sex as something dirty.